Tag: readers

Don’t you like to have regular readers on your blog? Don’t you want the readers that give feedback? that add value to your blog posts by providing quality comments? Have you ever tried to figure out how to convert your blog visitor to a regular reader? How to convince them to subscribe to your blog? As in the earlier post I talked about how to increase your blog traffic. But it would be injustice to not talk about converting that traffic into regular readers. Below are few wordpress plugins that can help you in getting more conversions (subscribers or readers).

This plugin allows you to show a greeting to your visitors depending on the referrer. Now what can be more easy way to let your visitors know how they can stay updated and how easily they can subscribe to your blog. What will be more effective is to provide the actual RSS link in the greeting with an action sentence to direct them to subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also request them to follow you on twitter.

Subscribe to comments will allow your visitors to subscribe to the blog posts comments via their email. This comes in handy when a user posts a comment on your blog and wants to be notified of the replies, or there is a valuable conversation going on the post and your visitor wants to stay updated on the conversion. In any case they will be notified of new comments on the particular blog post and they might visit your blog again to check the comments.

Threaded comments allow visitors to reply to a particular comment, so to start or take part in conversation. When a visitor will take part in conversation they will eventually come back to your blog again and again to check on the replies or updates. The more they visit your blog the more the chances are they will comment on other posts and hence will eventually become a regular reader of your blog.

This is an old plugin that still works with WordPress 2.8.4. The plugin was developed by Steve Smith and then it was handed over to Feedburner team and can be downloaded from here, until Google drops support for it. This plugin does not provide many fancy options but simply redirects your blog’s feed url to your feedburner’s feed url. By using feedburner you can track number of your subscribers and many other things, but by publishing those numbers on your blog you might get few more visitors interested in subscribing to your blog.

As I discussed earlier while discussing 5 ideas to encourage conversation on your blog, that making links in comments dofollow is just another trick to increase comments on your blog. So get the plugin installed and get ready to moderate large number of comments. You have been warned!!!.

Do you know of any other plugins that help encouraging your readers to keep coming back to your blog? Do you have any other ideas that can make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your blog? What strategies are you using on your blog to increase conversions?

Are you freaked out that people are visiting your blog but none of them leaving any comments? Are you scratching your head on how to ask those people to leave comments or feedback regarding your post? Here are few tricks to encourage your readers to leave comments or feedback. This post has evolved from a self-note as I am new to blogging, trying to learn and experiment with different things, tricks and strategies everyday.

Ask open ended questions

Asking open ended questions is one of the most worked trick for bloggers. Open ended questions are conversation starters, they encourage your readers to comment on your blog posts. As soon as reader encounters an open ended question they feel like being part of the conversation, you must have also experienced this. So what are open ended questions? Open ended questions are questions that does not have answer in one word or two. Open ended questions are designed to encourage a detailed answer which results in an ongoing conversation.

Write a tutorial

It is not neccessary that all users understand the complete tutorial you write, there might be something they want to be more clarified, or they might have a question related to your tutorial. What ever it be they are going to ask in comments which will possibly start a whole conversation there. The conversation or question can also give you idea about your next post.

Write controversial blog post

Controversial blog posts attract more comments, but before writing a controversial post make sure that you are writing sensibly and have enough information on the topic to back your thoughts or writing. Because if done wrong this can very badly effect your reputation and hence will result in lose of loyal readers.

Respond to comments

Try to respond to every comment, better try to respond in a way that will provoke the reader to further reply to you and hence will result in an ongoing conversation. Responding to comments also give the impression to your reader that you actually care about them and you value their comments or feedback.

DoFollow

This one is no brainer, make your blog do-follow and see even non-readers taking part into conversation on your blog. But keep a close eye and stay alert as it might get you lot of spam, so better be prepared to handle that.

How do you encourage your readers to comment or take part in conversations?